Welcome to Part 3 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish fresh content regularly to attract new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain how to configure a WordPress site so you can ensure that new web traffic will automatically start flowing just by publishing new content on a consistent basis on your web site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration Phase
Finding ways to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale, it’s worth looking into any and every opportunity you can to get better results online.
The ability to generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website means having an immediate advantage from the word “go”.
The Difference Is In The Way Your Site Is Configured
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence and a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take more labor to build and integrate an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a joke.
A Semi-True Story …
All is humming along in the gizmo plant when all of a sudden, things grinds to a stop.
As no one can figure out what is wrong, the plant manager decides to call in an expert.
The expert arrives shortly afterwards and, without uttering a word, goes immediately to the control box. After staring at the wiring board for no more than 2 minutes or so, the expert then produces a tiny hammer and makes a gentle tap near the top-left edge of the box.
Immediately, all the machinery inside the assembly line starts working as before.
The plant manager is grateful and relieved as he thanks the expert, who then leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager receives a request for payment of $5,000.
Bewildered to the point of feeling outrage, the manager calls the expert. Demanding to know why they were charged such a large amount of money for so little time spent delivering such a minimal amount of work, he promptly requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The #1 challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive web traffic consistently to their sites.
In the story we’ve just described, how much money did the factory stand to lose when the machines ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for years spent acquiring the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately fix a very costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have your web site set up so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and dozens of other traffic-generating online properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
While experts often make difficult situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy when you are trying to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few internal settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins you need to install to get various functionalities on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up to get specific results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to ensure that everything functions as expected, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically difficult, it can be quite complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking a couple of buttons, or configuring some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of various different parts such as your server, your WP site, and various third-party sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we were to create a simplified diagram of the activities involved in the configuration process, it would look like this …
(A simplified flowchart of the activities involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved in more detail.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for site installation purposes (this is normally done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is tweaking settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, requires planning for both bad and good traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This can include looking at things like implementing spam protection and securing server files, to configuring domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to set up and configure a number of external sites.
External Services
The idea behind adding external sites is that all content is posted to a central location (your site) and from there, it gets automatically distributed to other components of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external services to your system, content linking back to your website will be automatically posted to search, social and aggregator sites. Your site will be given exposure to new audiences and new sources of traffic.
Some of these third-party sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress settings to speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress site:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmasters)
Google Search Console lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with important data, tools, and reports about their website.
Once your account and site details have been set up, you can use this information with traffic-related settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s traffic performance, SEO, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine and social media referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site details have been set up, tracking code can be added to all of your web pages in WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and and sent to many other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. Once your account and site data are set up, use your details to automate traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers both the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your traffic system in Part 4 of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media accounts and attract new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
After setting up and configuring everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and bring new traffic to your site.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can You can syndicate your content to many social sites. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content sharing tools (we will look at some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are many social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of emerging web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are paid services.
For example, here is a content aggregator that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your RSS feeds and social profiles. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your social feed.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your web server and set up accounts with external services, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
Your WordPress administration area contains a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress dashboard menu – Settings)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings area contains one of the most important and often overlooked automated traffic notification systems available to website owners …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have specifically chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is available …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, your choice of displaying the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays in RSS feeds and blog post digests, and could impact someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to read the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The main setting here as far as your traffic system is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables your site to automatically notify all the update services you have listed whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, do not check this box …
(Global Settings – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although discussion settings are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your content, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow you to create search engine-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalinks Section)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring permalinks)
We have created a detailed tutorial on using permalinks in WordPress here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Plugin Settings
WordPress provides users with plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Let’s look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, web security is something you cannot afford to ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to bots and hackers.
Go here for more information:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can improve your website’s SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you post content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their site with WordPress plugins)
You can easily add social sharing to your site with free or inexpensive plugins.
Most social share plugins allow you to choose which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring layout and design elements of your website, some themes also include options for improving search optimization and site linking structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for better traffic results)
With a number of WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons to your content is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your options and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features that can be easily turned on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic – Other Features To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both good and bad traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online (or plan to), it’s important that your site is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help understanding how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress website, see this article:
Post Categories And Tags
Tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search engine optimization.
(Categories help search engines index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your website’s tags and categories should be discussed and set up during the Website Planning Phase.
When configuring your web site to automate and improve traffic, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s post tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits and results.
Visitor Site Map
A site map that lists all of your pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are two different things. Although search engines like Google can index your site just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – An Additional Source Of Web Traffic!
When visitors searching online for your website enter the wrong URL or click on a dead link, they will normally be presented with a 404 Not Found error page …
(A WordPress 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin.
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is add web content on a consistent basis to begin bringing more traffic organically.
The process of expertly configuring your WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site can take some web professionals a long time to acquire.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 3
To keep reading, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business and drive traffic sustainably using a WordPress website and proven online marketing methods.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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